The Library of Forgotten Books (2 page)

The audience gasped.

“Cést la ville!”

“It’s not possible.”

But it was. There was our town in some unknown future. I could see the Place de Cathedral high up on the little hill, with its tenth century church perched like a beached ship, and then the camera drifted down through the boulevards past the seventeenth and eighteenth century houses with their little balconies and flower baskets. The vision floated into Marcel’s, the booths now closed off with sliding wicker doors. One of the doors was open, and there was a future me, suited like a playboy, with dark-dressed women around me, leaning in and laughing, and Marcel looking on from behind the bar and cleaning glasses, chic and nonchalant. Other men looked on from other tables, as if something of import was happening in the booth. And then the image was gone and I remember nothing else of the Cinema, for I was frightened. It was as if I had seen all my hopes placed before me, some flash of my dreams made real, my promise realised. The women looked at me with love, the men with admiration. When we left the Cinema I had forgotten completely about kissing Elena. As she walked quietly beside me she said, “And now it begins.”

I gave the gang the following day off, and walked along the cliffs, climbing and descending stairs, coming to little lookouts over the azure sea, watching the boats bobbing up and down. Standing there, looking over the water, I was filled with a strange emptiness, as if things merely glided over my smooth surfaces, leaving me unmoved. Something was changing within me and the images of myself, projected the day before on the cinema screen, haunted me.

A figure leaned against the rail next to me.

“How did you find me?” I said.

“Perhaps it’s as your friend said.”

“We were meant to meet?” I hesitated. “Why
did
you approach me in the square?”

“I think I should go back to Paris. There’s nothing for me here.”

“You probably should,” I said. “There’s nothing here for anybody.”

“We’re lost,” she said.

“What have you seen at the Cinema? What is your future?” I said.

“Even in Paris, things seem to have slipped off track somewhere.” She looked out over the water. “I think I can see the islands out there. Have you ever been to them?”

“Why should I?”

“It’s a long way from this town, from all
this
.”

“There is no escape from this though is there? Eventually you have to face things.”

“Perhaps it’s just me,” she said ambiguously. “I regret taking you to the Cinema. If I could take it back, I would.”

“Things are as they are. So have you seen
your
future, at the Cinema?”

Still looking out over the water, she said, “When will this summer ever end?”

After she left, I crossed to Marcel’s, scoured his Parisian magazines and pieced together her history. She was a rising starlet, a little older than most, the knowledge of which must have settled in her like bone cancer, for to be an aging starlet is worse than to not be a starlet at all. Her films were avant-garde things I could not understand, where she appeared smouldering across the screen before the images disintegrated into bits of legs and torso, or snatches of her face grimacing, or glimpses of her bare breasts, or simply squares descending the screen as if the film had decayed to the point where it could no longer be viewed. The artists and bohemians of the country loved her, just as the tabloids did. She called herself Elena Mystique, and I searched in vain for her real name. She had done a good job of inventing herself, whoever she was.

I looked up to see the thin figure of Philippe Le Flic, his rubbery lips moving a cigarette around as he sat on the chair next to me. “They say you’re an up-and-comer.” He took a knife from his overcoat and touched the blade with his finger. “They say your gang is making it rich. We’ve had complaints. Tourists. Coming in to the police station. Like beggars to a soup kitchen. Gives the town a bad name. People won’t want to come here. People will
talk
.” He spoke in clipped sentences, as if each one was unrelated.

“You’ve got your own crews,” I said.

He leaned in to me. “And they’re running out of business. All the prey is being taken.”

“Well fucking teach them properly,” I said, aware that escalation was a disastrous move.

He leaned back and spoke softly, as if weighing up the words. “Fucking teach them...fucking teach them...” Eventually he stood up, slipped the knife back into his coat and left, still muttering, “Fucking teach them.”

I knew what was supposed to happen now. A war would start, and Le Flic would be found, the victim of a tragic car crash, his Citroën having plunged from one of the winding roads and over a cliff onto the rocks below. If not, I would be found wrapped in a fishing net out in the harbour, eyes eaten by fish, my body bloated.

“Emanuel. That was a mistake,” said Marcel.

“I don’t care.”

Marcel sat beside me at the table, a shot of coffee in one hand. “I know what’s happened to you. I’ve seen it a thousand times. All those people, staggering out of the Cinema, thinking their lives will take a particular path. I don’t know why you do it to yourself, when you know it’s a lie.”

“You don’t know what it’s like, seeing yourself. It’s as if you’ve finally found...the truth,” I said. “It’s a terrible thing to see your future.”

“Emanuel. You know that it’s only the future at that particular moment of your life when you are watching the Cinema. Every action you take afterwards changes that future. You will see another image the next time you watch the Cinema. It’s all an illusion!” Marcel took his shot of coffee in one gulp, checked his watch and lit a cigarette. “When the Lumière brothers showed the first movie—a train, arriving at a platform—the audience screamed and fled the theatre.” He sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette and adjusted his emerald cuff-links. We sat there a while and when he finished his cigarette he stood up, put his hand on my back and said, “The screen is not real, Emanuel. There was no train.”

In the days that followed, Elena and I ritually attended the Cinema, watching the coming attractions which now seemed to hold no attraction at all. We caught glimpses of the town and its futures, scattered before us like pebbles on the beach. We saw the future of others in the audience, who left laughing madly or crying softly.

I kept myself amused with fishermen’s daughters and café girls, lifting their bright dresses and having them quickly and emotionlessly in the steep stair-lined alleyways of the town. Like everything it had become a mechanical motion for me.

As we waited one day for the screen to flicker and the pianist to begin, Elena leaned over. “Do you feel guilty scamming tourists?”

“What? They come here with their wallets and their–” I stopped speaking, for it was coming out as rote. “I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care about scamming them or not scamming them.”

She nodded and placed her hand on my forearm. “We are one now,” she said. “We are the same.”

I shook it off. “You did this to me. You made me like this.”

“Did I make you come to the Cinema? Did I ask you to follow me around?”

I raised my hand to strike her.

“Go on!” she said. “Go on, you peasant.”

I lowered it again. “It’s this damned Cinema. It’s the fact that I know my future. What does yours look like?”

“Come here.” She tried to pull me to her, but I pushed her away. I stood up and said, “I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this Cinema. I can’t stand you.”

She looked at me as if she had been slapped, then reached out. “Emanuel.”

“Don’t you understand?” I said. “I don’t want you anymore. I don’t want anything anymore.” I left her there with the rest of the audience and that fickle screen on which all our nightmares were projected.

I found Petit Pierre and Guy and took them with me down to the waterfront. Along the wooden wharfs we walked. Fishermen in white and blue, little hats on their heads, working on their boats, fixed their lines. I caught snatches of their conversations: “
Après l’orage, il m’a dit, ‘jamais plus.
’” “
Mais
bien sur!
Il a peur
!” Past the fishing boats was the Marina with the sleek yachts, all white and polished with names like
La Petite Chanteuse, Pirandello and La Marquise
.

We passed them, and I said, “I always wanted to buy a boat.”

“Good to take the ladies out,” said Guy in his booming voice.

Pierre grinned. “A boat would show exactly who you are.”

“Like this one!” said Guy, running along the pier and pointing.

When he was a little way away Pierre looked up at me and said, “Emanuel, there’s talk that Philippe Le Flic is out to get us.”

I shrugged, “Bah, Le Flic is a no-one. Don’t worry about it.”

Pierre looked at me doubtfully. I was handling this all wrong. I was responsible for the gang. They had to trust me implicitly. There could be no doubt in their mind of our success.

“Someone said they saw Guy with him.”

“Don’t worry about it Pierre,” I said wearily. “I’ll talk to Guy.”

“Emanuel, I’ve heard that Le Flic wants us to bring you out on the water one day...”

“
Arét
Pierre
! I’ll handle it.”

Guy was calling us over: “Come on!” We found him standing before a boat. “It’s perfect,” he said, “Look.” I looked down at its smooth lines. Along its prow was written its name:
The Tomorrow
.

We had become the most successful crew in the town—better than Mad Henri’s, which specialised in cat-burglary, or Simenon’s that scammed old women by posing as an exiled prince and his entourage—and I was approached every day by people who wanted to join. It meant nothing to me.

I did not see Elena for some time, and I did not care. Instead the crew continued our scams, my work becoming lazy and arrogant, until one day, as Pierre was rolling the ball from cup to cup before an Old English Duchess under my apathetic eye, Le Flic appeared suddenly beside them.

“Madame,”
said Le Flic. “This is an illegal game...a scam.”

Pierre snatched up his things but Le Flic grasped him by the wrist. Guy and Matthieu both moved backwards and looked across at me.

I took four quick steps, launched myself at Le Flic. My shoulder crashed into his side and he let go of Pierre. Together we fell on the ground.

“Go,” I said to Pierre as Le Flic rolled up, his cruel face red, his eyes wide with rage. He kicked me in the side and I felt burning pain. I curled into a ball. He raised his foot and stomped on my thigh.

“
Monsieur
!” I heard Marcel’s voice from the café.

Le Flic looked around, straightened out his suit and pulled out a cigarette.

In the Police station, there was barely an interview at all. Le Flic simply walked around me and repeated, “You have no future in this town. You have nothing. You are nothing.” Occasionally he struck me, but I sat stone-faced. I had suffered worse beatings before.

After I was charged, I returned to the square and thanked Marcel for trying to intervene.

“
De rien
,” he said and gestured with his eyes to the door.

Elena stood there, and she said, “Come with me to the Cinema.”

“No.”

“I thought we had something,” she said.

“You simply cannot bear not being adored.”

She trembled and said, “It’s meant to be. Don’t you understand that it’s our destiny? Come.” She dragged me with her to the Cinema, and I didn’t resist.

We sat in those plush chairs, cigarette smoke drifting languorously around us, and again a near-future vision of the town appeared, this time criss-crossed with hovering trams. It was twilight, and it may have been autumn or spring. The camera zoomed past the Place de la Tranquille and down plunging streets to the Place de Conards. There the images slowed and at the corner of the screen, in a little doorway sheltered from the cold and away from the passing pedestrians, stood Elena. She seemed broken down, her bones showing through her body like an old horse’s, her makeup too much for her gaunt face. She was perhaps fifty. She had the appearance of a mad woman, her former glories remembered only in the broken labyrinth of her mind. She crossed the road, dodging a Vespa, and came to a middle-aged man who grinned a toothless grin, wiped his hand on his strained trousers, took a cigarette butt from her and tried to light it with a failing lighter.

In the cinema, I grabbed Elena’s arm. “It’s us.”

When the session was over, we descended the little winding streets and steep stairways, the sighing statues perched on the outcrops, catching the wind in their whistling openings, emitting a wailing into the sea. Filled with a panicked energy, I rambled on about how life was like walking along a set of criss-crossing mountain paths.

We came to the tiny pebbled beach, bounded by cliffs, as if caught in the hand of some rock-giant, boats in the sheltered harbour, and sunbakers turning red under the descending orange sun. At the end of some breathless rant I said, “Don’t you see what this means? Marcel was right. It means our future is in our hands. We can do anything. Every action. Every single day. Every moment alters our trajectory, like a kite in the wind.”

Elena turned and said, viciously, “Don’t you understand? No matter what I do, it always turns out the same. The future never alters for me.”

At Marcel’s we sat in silence. The crazed energy still rushed through me like a drug. I wanted her more than anything.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Every time you see yourself at the Cinema, it’s always the same?”

She rolled her eyes in a vague way. Perhaps she thought I was a fool. Or perhaps she thought it was self-evident.

I reached out and grabbed her hand, but it was limp in mine. I held it nevertheless. We make our own luck.

I stood, pulled her with me, and took her outside to the cobblestoned square. The summer air was cool, gentle little gusts against my face. Couples crossed the square, arm in arm, or sat on the steps of the Cinema talking softly. A group of drunken youths laughed and called to each other nearby.